Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on January 13, 2026 | 81 Comments
Happy new(ish) year. As hinted by the second part of my title, this post isn’t a two-part retrospective on the Beatles, with a follow-up on John and Ringo. Instead, it’s mostly a sort-of review of Paul Kingsnorth’s recent book Against the Machine (henceforth ATM). But while thinking about Paul Kingsnorth, I find it hard not to think also about George Monbiot – sometime friends and fellow travellers in the broadly left-wing environmentalist movement whose intellectual, political and spiritual journeys have now diverged sharply. Also, arguably the two most prominent contemporary English writers on the conjunction of politics, nature and society. …
Continue readingPosted on November 11, 2025 | 60 Comments
To coincide with the US publication today of my new book Finding Lights in a Dark Age, I think it’s time to start writing some blog posts about it. I have a bit of unfinished business in relation to other projected posts, but hopefully I can sweep them up somewhere along the way. It’s going to be a slow tick over, though, because I don’t currently have much capacity to turn out blog posts at speed. I’ll begin by linking something I mention at the very start of the book with something I mention at the very end. At the …
Continue readingPosted on July 12, 2025 | 13 Comments
Happy news if you’re bored of me trailing my new book – I’m shortly going to hand over to a much valued long-term commenter here at Small Farm Future, Eric Farnsworth, so that he can trail his instead. But, lest you fear my powers of self-promotion are waning, let me also draw your attention in passing to this TBLI podcast I recently did with Robert Rubinstein. Also, before we get to Eric’s book, I just want to thank commenters for the multiple discussions under my clown and two romances post. Apologies I didn’t have the time to respond much. Just …
Continue readingPosted on June 5, 2025 | 46 Comments
I mentioned the new Root and Branch Collective – described here and here – in my last post and said I planned to write something about it. So here goes. Why write about it? Well, partly because the group (henceforth I’ll call it RBC) has a lot to say about agrarian localism, which is kinda my bag. Also because RBC invokes influence from various Marxist and post-Marxist frameworks (in their words ‘critical agrarian studies, legal geography, anti-colonial Marxism, postcolonial studies and world systems theory’). These frameworks have also influenced me, and still do, particularly in trying to get to grips …
Continue readingPosted on April 26, 2025 | 66 Comments
Pretty much the last nail in the coffin for the idea that there’s going to be a smooth transition out of fossil fuels and into renewables that can rescue the existing high-energy global economy in anything like its present form comes courtesy of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and his 2024 book More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy. I wrote about the idea of a supposed energy ‘transition’ quite a bit last year (for example, here) and I don’t plan to go over that ground again. But Fressoz’s book is such an informative read that a post about it …
Continue readingPosted on January 6, 2025 | 107 Comments
Happy new year. I’m pretty deep in book-writing mode at the moment, and therefore unlikely to have much to offer here for another couple of months. But I thought I’d put out an open comment post inviting readers to debate a few points and questions, which I will then shamelessly plunder as material for my book. So … I’ve been a regular visitor at my wonderful local bookshop Hunting Raven recently, buying various forbidding non-fiction titles by way of background research for my own book. One of the staff asked jokingly if I ever just settled down with a good …
Continue readingPosted on December 11, 2024 | 52 Comments
I wrote a long review article that’s just been published in The Land magazine, engaging critically with various books bearing on farming and wildlife in Britain, but hopefully of wider interest. I’m reproducing it here (if I have time I may give a bit of background to it in my next post): It’s fallen to me to honour the promise in The Land 34 of reviewing Guy Shrubsole’s new book, The Lie of the Land. I can only do this by putting it into a wider context, so this essay considers not only aspects of Guy’s preceding book, The Lost …
Continue readingPosted on June 24, 2024 | 24 Comments
The present global meta-crisis seems certain to affect not just global politics but also the underlying structure of global politics in the existing system of nation-states. What’s the outlook for modern nation-states as the crisis unfolds? The question is probably too broad, and better addressed on a case by case, or at least a power bloc by power bloc, basis. I’ll aim to do that here with reference to one country and one power bloc, with the help of two recent books bearing on the issues. Another England? First up is Caroline Lucas’s Another England: How to Reclaim Our National …
Continue readingPosted on June 17, 2024 | 32 Comments
The word ‘rewilding’ has had its day and now needs to slip gracefully into retirement. That, at any rate, is the polite suggestion I’m going to make in this post, which is the last in my recent mini-series on ‘wrecked’ land and what to do about it. It’s not that, for the most part, I object to a lot of the practical activities that are done in the name of rewilding by conservationists, land managers, farmers, ecologists and so on. In that sense, I agree with most of what Ian Carter says in this recent article, except for his concluding …
Continue readingPosted on June 2, 2024 | 58 Comments
The end of my last post left a few threads hanging, not least a promise to say something about Carwyn Graves’s wonderful book, Tir: The Story of the Welsh Landscape (2024, Calon). But let me approach obliquely from a more personal angle. Sometimes I make the mistake of reading negative online comments about my writing. A comment I read under a YouTube interview I did a while ago went something along the lines of “what Smaje didn’t mention is that he keeps sheep, which have a brutal ecological impact”. Now, it’s true that for about six of the twenty years …
Continue readingPosted on May 26, 2024 | 39 Comments
To say there are now a series of interlocking and difficult worldwide crises that we must somehow navigate our way out of is hardly news. To say that we might fail to navigate our way out of them and therefore face societal collapses of some kind is a little more unorthodox, but isn’t exactly a bombshell. Even the British Government has just launched its own prepping website. In this and the next couple of posts, I’m going to draw on some interesting recent writings that try to discern the navigational direction, and test the waters for the price of failure, …
Continue readingPosted on May 2, 2024 | 122 Comments
Given my conviction that humanity’s long-term future is likely to revolve around low-energy local agrarianism, I’ve long pondered whether the example of people who’ve pursued that way of life in the past – namely peasantries – is relevant to this future scenario. The answer, I believe, is the same as the answer to many tricky social-political questions: yes and no. But I’m always interested in sources that can put a bit more nuance to it. One such source is a recent book by the eminent historian, Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World (Allen Lane, 2024). …
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